Relative Manin-Mumford for semi-abelian surfaces

We show that Ribet sections are the only obstruction to the validity of the relative Manin–Mumford conjecture for one-dimensional families of semi-abelian surfaces. Applications include special cases of the Zilber–Pink conjecture for curves in a mixed Shimura variety of dimension 4, as well as the study of polynomial Pell equations with non-separable discriminants.